CAPÍTULO II MARCO TEÓRICO
2.2 Marco Teórico
2.2.6 Planteamiento estratégico
Teach For America’s experience offers the greatest lessons for other education and
nonprofit organizations that seek to scale their impact. But as an organization that operates in public schools and receives significant public funding, Teach For America is also heavily influenced by public policies—as are most organizations seeking to scale impact in the education space. Teach For America’s experience offers lessons about how public policies can support the growth to scale of high-impact education organizations—as well as how existing policies create barriers to scaling effective models.
These lessons are particularly important given the recent federal policy focus on fostering education innovation and scaling effective models. Through the i3 grant program, the federal government has invested $1.2 billion over the past five years to support education innovation and scale models with solid evidence of effectiveness, awarding grants through a highly competitive process. Other federal grants, such as the Social Innovation Fund, administered by the Corporation for National and Community Service, also provide funding to foster innovation and scale effective models. These programs have several promising characteristics:
• They recognize of the need for innovation in education, and federal investment in
supporting the development and testing of new models.
• They link funding to evidence of impact, through a tiered framework that requires
solid evidence of effectiveness as a condition for larger grants, sets high standards for the quality and rigor of evidence, and mandates that programs undertake a rigorous, independent evaluation as a condition of funding.
• They provide significant funding to scale the impact of organizations with a proven
track record of effectiveness.
This approach, which stands in stark contrast to the formula-based programs through which most federal education funds are distributed, offers real potential to support the development and scaling of effective education models. Federal policymakers should continue to invest in innovation and tie more federal funding to evidence of effectiveness. At the same time, Teach For America’s—and other grantees’—experience with the i3 program suggests that there are opportunities to improve it. The i3 grant has been shoehorned into the parameters of more traditional competitive grant programs, when in fact a new form altogether is needed to support its goals. The next iteration of federal support for innovation could strengthen i3 by implementing the following recommendations:
• Decouple investments in innovation from investments in scaling models with evidence of effectiveness. The existing i3 grant program tries to do two very different things—
support the development of new, innovative (but by definition unproven) approaches, and support the growth to scale of proven models. But these different purposes would be
better served by different programmatic structures. Rather than continuing to combine the two in one program, the federal government should create a dedicated program to support innovation in education—similar to the ARPA-ED model proposed by Senator Michael Bennet (D-Colorado)—and a separate funding stream to support the growth and ongoing work of organizations with a demonstrated track record of effectiveness. • Create a dedicated pool of federal funding to scale and sustain effective
organizations and models. The vast majority of the $25.7 billion in annual federal
K–12 education spending supports activities with no demonstrated evidence of effectiveness.14 To increase the percentage of federal funds that support effective
educational strategies, the government should set aside a portion of federal education funding exclusively for grants to organizations or models that have rigorous empirical evidence of their effectiveness in addressing national education needs. Such organizations should be eligible to receive term-limited grants of one to three years that could be renewed based on evidence of continued effectiveness and impact. Program design should minimize the emphasis on grant writing, or “plans,” and instead focus on evidence of prospective grantees’ effectiveness and the number of children, teachers, or schools that they currently serve. This approach is similar to the Grants for Replication and Expansion of High-Quality Charter Schools, which were created within the federal Charter Schools Program in 2010 and have provided nearly $90 million to support the scale-up of high-performing charter schools. Federal policymakers could create a similar set-aside within Title II of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act to support the growth and replication of teacher preparation, professional development, and leadership preparation organizations with evidence of effectiveness. The Supporting Effective Educators Development program created in the 2011 appropriations bill sets aside a portion of Title II funds for national organizations, but at $30 million, it constitutes less than 1.3 percent of all federal Title II funding and is narrowly targeted to award grants for specific activities historically funded with line-item funds (including Teach For America). Creating more robust set-asides for proven models within existing formula-based federal education programs would allow more national organizations with a track record of results to secure national resources through a transparent, competitive process, rather than by manipulating the political process.
This paper is primarily focused on scaling education organizations. There is an extensive literature on public policies related to improving teacher quality and modernizing the teaching profession—issues largely beyond the scope of this paper. That said, public policies related to teacher quality have shaped Teach For America’s growth over the past 15 years in a variety of ways. While Teach For America has had considerable success in overcoming state policy barriers to placing corps members as teachers, its experience highlights several more subtle implications for local, state, and federal policies related to teacher quality:
• Be intentional about talent. Teach For America’s own corps member recruitment
and selection, alumni leadership development, and internal human assets practices illustrate the importance of being intentional about recruiting, selecting, and developing talent—but this intentionality about talent is lacking in many public education organizations. Policymakers can learn from and replicate components of Teach For America’s approach to cultivating talent.
• Use data to improve hiring decisions. Over time, Teach For America has improved its
corps member selection process by comparing data on corps member impact to data collected at admissions, and using this analysis to refine selection criteria. Using a similar approach would enable school districts to significantly improve the quality of their hiring practices and decisions. Since districts have much greater access to teacher and student performance data than Teach for America does, they could significantly accelerate the pace of learning about the characteristics of effective teachers that can be discerned at hiring.
• Identify and cultivate leadership talent. School districts should also be much more
intentional about identifying and cultivating potential leadership talent, adopting strategies such as the “talent trackers” that Teach For America managers use to track team members’ desire and readiness to take on roles of greater leadership. Districts’ failure to invest in building their leadership pipelines is one of the reasons that Teach For America has invested significant resources over the past decade in supporting and developing alumni who wish to become school leaders. In essence, Teach For America has taken on this role because districts have not.
• Invest in state and local talent ecosystems. The majority of state funds for public
education flow through formulas to local school districts and schools—as they should. Policymakers in a number of states and cities increasingly recognize that expanding access to quality education for all students requires not just schools and districts but a larger ecosystem—including human capital and tool providers—to support schools. As a major provider of human capital to high-needs urban and rural school districts, Teach For America is an important part of that ecosystem, and has effectively lobbied to secure public funds for its work in many states and districts. But in this respect it is something of the exception that illustrates the rule. Going forward, policymakers need to think about how to create sustainable funding pools and mechanisms to create the ecosystem of human capital and other supports that high-poverty schools need. • Rethink the highly qualified teacher requirement. No Child Left Behind’s highly
qualified teacher requirement was intended to ensure that low-income students have equitable access to qualified teachers and that teachers have training in the subjects they teach. But, as numerous policy analyses have documented, HQT has not achieved these goals.15 Teach For America has secured legislative changes that
provision imposes significant costs on corps members: requiring them to complete higher education coursework that evidence suggests does little to make them more effective in the classroom, placing further burdens on their time during the already stressful first year of teaching, and forcing some to make significant out-of-pocket expenditures—up to $15,000 a year in some regions—or take on large student loans to pay for coursework. These costs are particularly burdensome for potential corps members from low-income backgrounds. Any future reauthorization of Title II or of ESEA should carefully balance the costs and benefits of the HQT provisions, including those that apply to alternative-route teachers.
• Track and publish data on the outcomes of teacher preparation programs. Teach For
America is one of very few educator preparation programs that has been subject to a rigorous, independent evaluation of its impact on student learning. Many teacher preparation programs make little or no effort to track what happens to their alumni after graduation. This means that, despite positive evidence of Teach For America corps members’ impact compared with the impact of other teachers working with similar students, it is not possible to compare Teach For America’s results to those of most other teacher preparation programs. Given the significant amount of money spent on teacher preparation—much of which comes from federal student aid or state subsidies for public universities—and the fact that teacher preparation programs typically must obtain state approval, it is unconscionable that we do not know more about their results. Recently, states—including Tennessee, Louisiana, and North Carolina—have begun linking data on teachers’ employment and student learning outcomes back to the institutions at which they were prepared, and producing public reports on the rate at which graduates of different preparation programs obtain jobs as teachers, the schools in which they work, and their impact on students’ learning. Increasing the number of states that link and publicly report this data would increase our knowledge about the results of different teacher preparation programs, enable prospective students and employers to make more informed decisions, and accelerate the pace of learning and continuous improvement in the sector.
O
ver the past 15 years, Teach For America has grown dramatically and produced impressive results by maintaining an intensive focus on the core activities within its Theory of Change: recruiting, preparing, and supporting corps members to have immediate impact in classrooms, and cultivating and supporting alumni leadership to drive long-term systemic impact. Through these activities, Teach For America has improved the educational experiences of millions of students and produced leaders who are playing crucial roles in transforming public education to better serve historically underserved students.But these activities alone are not sufficient to produce the impact that Teach For America ultimately seeks to have on the world. Getting to the “one day” when “all children in this nation will have the opportunity to attain an excellent education” requires changes beyond those that Teach For America can drive on its own.
To achieve that goal, Teach For America must learn how to work more collaboratively with families, communities, and other organizations in the educational and social justice fields, while maintaining its focus on its core activities—and continuing to perform those activities with even higher levels of quality. This is both the greatest challenge and the greatest opportunity of Teach For America’s next 10 to 15 years.
Teach For America’s leaders have recognized this challenge. The re-articulated core values and the five commitments voiced by Co-CEOs Matt Kramer and Elisa Villanueva Beard demonstrate this. The new operating model is designed to foster
Conclusion
Teach For America has improved the educational experiences of millions of students and produced leaders who are playing crucial roles in transforming public education to better serve historically underserved students.
innovation and deepen relationships between regions and their communities. And the new communications and public engagement strategy is designed to move Teach For America beyond its historic insularity to greater engagement with both its local communities and the broader media and education landscape. At the same time, through TAL X.0 and ongoing research and continuous-improvement efforts, Teach For America is working to better support corps members and increase their impact on student learning.
These changes are not without risks, particularly the shift to a new regional operating model that will allow greater variation in approach and quality across sites. And Teach For America will continue to operate in a polarized and sometimes hostile public education landscape that creates new challenges for its work. Collectively, however, these recent changes position Teach For America to transform the way it engages corps members, alumni, families, communities, policymakers, and the public over the coming years, in pursuit of greater impact at the student, school, and broader school systems level.
Over the past 25 years, Teach For America has played a crucial role in transforming the education reform landscape in ways that no one imagined when the organization launched. The choices that Teach For America has made over the past 15 years, and those it is making today, will continue to shape the education landscape well into the middle of the 21st century.
Endnotes
1 The 2011–12 school year is the most recent year for which the U.S. Department of Education’s Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) reports data on the number of graduates produced by higher education–based teacher preparation programs in the U.S. According to IPEDS data, the institution that awarded the largest number of education degrees in 2011–12, the University of Phoenix, produced 4,932 graduates that year. In the same school year, Teach For America placed 5,031 corps members in their first year as teachers. These numbers likely radically understate the extent to which Teach For America is the nation’s largest source of new teachers, however. IPEDS data report the number of students receiving an education degree from a preparation institution in any given year, but not whether those individuals went on to receive state certification or obtain employment as teachers. Data from states that collect data on job placement rates for graduates of teacher preparation programs suggests that a significant percentage of students who complete these programs do not immediately obtain employment as teachers. In contrast, all 5,031 Teach For America first-year corps members began working in schools as teachers in fall 2011. 2 Wendy Kopp, One Day, All Children: The Unlikely Triumph of Teach For America and What I Learned Along the Way
(New York: Public Affairs. 2001) 3 Ibid., page 70.
4 See, for example: Office of Planning, Evaluation and Policy Development, Policy and Program Studies Service, Evaluation of the Comprehensive School Reform Program Implementation and Outcomes: Third-Year Report (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Education. 2008)
5 Impacts of the Teach For America Investing in Innovation Scale-Up (Washington, D.C.: Mathematica Policy Research. Forthcoming).
6 No Child Left Behind Act of 2001: Public Law 107–110, 107th Cong. (Jan. 8, 2002), Sec. 9101.
7 For a full accounting of the debate over NCLB’s highly qualified teacher provisions and the impact of these provisions on Teach For America’s engagement in federal advocacy and policymaking, see Alexander Russo, Left Out of No Child Left Behind (Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute, October 2012) http:// www.aei.org/files/2012/10/10/-left-out-of-no-child-left-behind-teach-for-americas-outsized-influence-on- alternative-certification_145912598416.pdf.
8 Higher Education Opportunity Act of 2008, Public Law 110–315, 110th Cong. (August 14, 2008).
9 See Office of Postsecondary Education, Preparing and Credentialing the Nation’s Teachers: The Secretary’s Ninth Report on Teacher Quality (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Education. 2013) https://title2.ed.gov/Public/ TitleIIReport13.pdf Table 1.1. Because not all teacher preparation programs provided complete demographic data, the report was missing data for 8 percent of the sample. We calculated this percentage based on the data provided.
10 Impacts of the Teach For America Investing in Innovation Scale-Up (Washington, D.C.: Mathematica Policy Research. Forthcoming).
11 Huffman and Rhee divorced in 2007.
12 Dana Markow, Lara Macia, and Helen Lee, “Challenges for School Leadership: A Survey of Teachers and Principals,” conducted by Harris Interactive for MetLife, Inc. (2012) https://www.metlife.com/assets/cao/ foundation/MetLife-Teacher-Survey-2012.pdf.
13 Jay P. Green, “Buckets into the Sea: Why Philanthropy Isn’t Changing Schools, and How It Could,” in Frederick M. Hess, ed. With the Best of Intentions: How Philanthropy Is Reshaping K–12 Education (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Education Press, 2005).
14 New America Foundation, Federal Education Budget Project, “No Child Left Behind Overview,” febp. newamerica.net. Figure reflects fiscal year 2014 appropriations for federal education programs authorized under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act and does not include spending on special education programs authorized by the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act or K–12 education spending by other federal agencies.
15 See, for example: Christopher O. Tracy and Kate Walsh, Necessary and Insufficient: Resisting a Full Measure of Teacher Quality (Washington, D.C.: National Council on Teacher Quality, 2004).
We would like to thank the many current and former Teach For America staff, board
members, and other stakeholders who shared their views and experience to inform our work on this project: Beth Anderson, Josh Anderson, Lorraine Anderson, Michael Aronson, Susan Asiyanbi, Monique Ayotte-Hoeltzel, Latricia Barksdale, Grant Besser, Marion Hodges Biglan, Sandy Brown, Robert Carreon, Tracy-Elizabeth Clay, Lora Cover, Aimee Eubanks Davis, John Deasy, Gigi Dixon, Steven Farr, Amanda Fernandez, Paul Finnegan, JoAnn Gama, Emily Gelb, Melissa Golden, Kwame Griffith, Tomeka Hart, Jerry Hauser, Lindsay Hill, Audrey Hooks, Kevin Huffman, Kira Orange Jones, Rhonda Khalifey-Aluise, Elissa Kim, Wendy Kopp, Matt Kramer, Suzanne Lynn, Anne Mahle, Steve Mandel, Lee McGoldrick, Raegen Miller, Stephanie Morimoto, Chris Nelson, Ron Nurnberg, Annie O’Donnell, Andrea Pursley, Ted Quinn, Eric Scroggins, Talia Shaull, Lance Tackett, Katie Tennessen, Eric Thomas, Tom Torkelson, Elisa Villanueva-Beard, Jeff Wetzler, David Wick, and Alicia Winckler. We are particularly grateful to Beth Anderson, Anne Mahle, and Quianna Ford for their diligent work collecting historical Teach For America documents and data to inform our work, and to Davis Acker, Jessica Cordova Kramer, Hillary Lewis, Raegen Miller, Rachel Perara, and Yamilee Toussaint for their assistance in collecting or reviewing historical Teach For America data and documents. Finally,